Mark Landler

a great deal under the existing arrangement.

And furthermore, the Danes would welcome that.

The Danish government has said over and over again, we are willing to have discussions with the United States.

We would welcome greater involvement, not just military, but commercial.

So I think the president is not quite right when he makes this argument.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And I think that there was one specific event that happened that changed the calculations of a lot of people.

And that was the military operation in Venezuela in which the president, Nicolas Maduro, was removed by American military forces and taken to the United States to face criminal drug trafficking charges.

I think that event, more than any other single thing, caused a lot of people to sit up and say, hey, wait a minute, when he's talking about Greenland, he's actually serious.

You had a number of the president's advisors, memorably Stephen Miller, go on TV and kind of make the point this flexing of muscle is something that the world should expect to see from the United States elsewhere.

We need Greenland for national security.

And in effect, this brute philosophy of might makes right started being widely broadcast by the president himself.

And so Europeans are suddenly extremely worried.

We had what I will describe as a frank but also constructive discussion.

The Danes send officials, along with Greenland officials, to meet with President Trump's aides at the White House to try to work out some sort of a compromise.

The president has made his view clear, and we have a different position.

They leave empty-handed.

You have NATO allies of Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom pledging to send small numbers of troops to Greenland as a show of solidarity.

Things are really ratcheting up, and suddenly this is a genuine full-blown crisis.

And at that point, President Trump